12/30/2003

Jokes during St. Petersburg's gubernatorial election that Valentina Matviyenko's term in office could be as long as Leonid Brezhnev's may not be funny at all, if a union between St. Petersburg and Leningrad region, proposed last week, goes through.

Caspian OPEC? MOSCOW (Bloomberg) -- Oil-producing states near the Caspian Sea should set up a regional oil organization similar to OPEC, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev told Interfax. Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan are among the countries that have large oil deposits in the region and Iran is the only member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to border the Caspian Sea. ""World experts confirm that, by and large, the reason why Arab countries and OPEC are nervous is not so much the scale of Caspian deposits as the fact that the states in the region are not members of the cartel,"" Nazarbayev said in an interview with Interfax in Astana. Caspian states ""should set up their own organization before it is too late,"" he said. Iran, which borders the Caspian Sea, is one of the 11 members of OPEC, which was founded in 1960. Russia and Kazakhstan have sometimes attended OPEC conferences as observers.

President Vladimir Putin has signed into law a milestone deposit insurance bill expected to help private banks attract billions of dollars Russians keep under their mattresses, the Kremlin said Monday.

Torus Investment Managers, a money management firm that targets British investors looking to tap the Russian market, plans to raise ?50 million ($89 million) for a fund investing in real estate in the country.

China National Petroleum Corp., or CNPC, has won a bid to buy about 60 percent of Russian energy firm Stimul in what would be China's first foray into Russia's energy sector, market sources said Monday.

Evrazholding Group, the nation's biggest steelmaker, is shifting sales to the local market and plans to buy an Asian steel-processing plant to avoid import quotas and tariffs on crude steel it faces in countries from the America to China.

All Missiles Removed MOSCOW (AP) -- The Russian military has removed all Soviet-built anti-aircraft missiles from its vast arms depots in the Transdnester province of Moldova to prevent them from falling into the hands of terrorists, officials said Monday. The missiles were brought from Transdnester to the Chkalovsky military air base near Moscow on Saturday by two heavylift Il-76 military cargo planes, the Defense Ministry said in a statement. A spokesman for the ministry, who asked not be named, would not say how many weapons were evacuated, but he said that no anti-aircraft missiles are left in Transdnester. About 2,000 Russian troops remain in Transdnester, guarding giant Soviet-era ammunition depots and acting as peacekeepers. Ingush Shooting VLADIKAVKAZ, North Ossetia (AP) -- Ingush authorities on Monday were investigating allegations that federal troops were responsible for killing a senior police official.

Outside, Arctic darkness envelops the mountains, but inside, a video of bikini-clad Beyonce blasts on a big screen in this northern mining town, and members of the New Civilization youth movement are discussing their latest project.

A group of private guards broke into a Methodist church in northern Moscow, awoke sleeping church members and forcefully evicted them from the building and onto the freezing street, church officials said.

News of the October arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky was greeted with shock and horror in Washington, which had come to regard the Yukos billionaire as its most influential agent in Moscow -- a position previously held by Anatoly Chubais, the man chiefly responsible for Khodorkovsky's vast wealth.